Financial and Mortgage Paradise

What is a network anyway? It isn’t tangible, so if it does exist, it exists in your mind as a set of contacts organized along whatever lines suit you. Or it may not be organized at all, although when you work on your own that may be a bit too random for your own good. So if you can have a network when you work for a company, and in your social life, then you can certainly have one when you work for yourself. One crucial thing links everyone who works on their own: they work on their own!

Which means that they all go through what you go through. There are few more unifying features than this one crucial bit of common ground. So whenever self-employed people meet, they usually end up with lots to discuss. The sort of stuff they talk about is often very wide-ranging, precisely because they are juggling all the work and personal issues. This may sound self-evident, but consider the number of business meetings between those who work for companies that never get near to touching on their feelings or social lives – the things that really matter to them. There are millions of these so-called conversations everyday, and they are usually much more one-dimensional than the subject matter when two sole traders meet.

So the conversations between sole traders are wider ranging and have a tremendous capacity to generate genuine empathy. Put simply: you are very likely to sympathize with each other and to get on. That’s a good basis for a relationship. You will both want to pay significant attention to what the other is good at, and what they enjoy doing. This makes sense for three reasons:

- You are in the same boat

- You both earn a living by listening to others

- They might be able to help you (the other person will be thinking the same thing).

That’s a good equation in anyone’s book. If this state of affairs is repeated over multiple conversations for a year or two, you are going to develop a pretty extensive set of contacts with other sole traders with whom you can swap experiences and other contacts. This applies whether they work in your area or not. Those who do similar work to you will be interesting to meet because you can compare specifics about your field, and they may be very useful to know about when it comes to referring surplus work. Self-employed people who do not work in your sector are equally fascinating to talk to. As well as all the general issues that confront those who work on their own, you may well find that it is their very lack of knowledge about your area that makes their comments all the more valuable. You have all heard people say ‘I’m too close to it’, so this type of encounter offers the equivalent of an objective commentator whose opinions are not biased by what they think they already know about your subject. So now you have a self-employed network.

You need to confront the fact that, when you work on your own, you are the company culture. There are no hazy mission statements to fall back on, no Human Resources department, and no glossy brochure to cover up for shoddy behaviour. You need to behave as you would like others to behave. What does that mean? Well, disregarding personal style for a moment, there are some basic principles of good conduct to which you should adhere. For example:

- Be polite

- Be realistic

- Turn up on time

- Return calls when you say you will

- Pay your bills immediately

- Over-deliver if you wish, but never under-deliver.

You can create your own list of this type based on your personal preferences and the nature of your business. Over time, you will undoubtedly receive back as much good behaviour as you dish out. You will gain a reputation for high standards, integrity and honesty. Repeat business will follow.

Or, put another way, if you are small-minded, you will lose good customers and attract those who are also small-minded and unreliable. At an early stage, map out what you believe to be the important parts of how to conduct your business, and use that as a blueprint to determine how you should conduct yourself and in turn what you expect and desire of others. This will stand you in good stead if you have to confront a dilemma about whether to decline some business, or if you have to take the harsh decision to inform an existing customer that you will no longer work with them. Making such a fundamental decision on the spot often comes across as impetuousness or impatience, but if you have thought through your principles carefully, you can state calmly and clearly that their way of doing things does not tally with yours. That’s your right as someone who works on their own.

Only do business with people that you like

This is quite a tricky area but it really is worth spending the time to work out how you feel about your business relationships. Naturally, if you work in a service business or run a retail outlet you can’t vet everybody with whom you have a transaction. But you can choose the nature of your suppliers and associates. And as you develop your own personal style, you will become better at working out what other people are like to deal with. Eventually, you should be in a position whereby it is you who chooses to do business with somebody, not the other way round.

Why is this important? Because ultimately if you do not enjoy the company of the people with whom you have to interact, you will effectively have engineered a state of affairs in which you don’t like what you do. This is a disaster for anyone who runs their own business. Indeed, the whole point of working on your own is to design a set-up that suits your particular style. Of course, sometimes it takes a while for someone to show their true colours, and there will be times when somebody you really like lets you down. Unfortunately, there is nothing you can do about this, and it is undoubtedly true that any disappointments will be felt harder by you as an individual than by companies in the collective sense. However, in the long run, your judgement will improve with experience, and your goal should be only t do business with the people that you like.

Design a clever mailing to send to your customers

It’s amazing the number of businesses that send out one launch mailing and then sit back thinking that they have ‘done marketing’. Oh dear. The market is changing all the time. People come and go. Products and tastes change. You can never conclusively prove that something that didn’t work before won’t work now.

Consider the merits of sending out a new mailing to your customers:

- What would you say?

- Have you ever done it before?

- Did you learn anything?

- Who would you send it to?

- Existing customers for repeat purchase?

- Or new potential customers? If so, where will you get their details?

Ask your customers what else you could do for them

How many businesses plough on churning out the same old stuff, assuming that what they provide is what their customers want? Most people don’t like change unless someone else does all the work and makes it a pleasure. Then they can opt in or out on their own whim and in their own time. Unfortunately, when you work on your own, that someone is you. It is your job to stay very close to your customers and the markets in which you operate.

When you have some new ideas that you want to test, or even if you have none at all (hopefully not, otherwise you may be lacking the entrepreneurial spirit shown by most people who work on their own), talk to your customers. Ask them:

- What else could I do for you?

- Did you realize that what I do for you is only a fraction of what I do for some of my other customers?

- How much does what I do make a difference to your business?

- What are the main things preoccupying you at the moment?

- Would you like me to investigate something new for you?

- Are you dissatisfied with any suppliers who provide similar services to me?

- Do you know any other potential customers who might want to use my services?

- What could I do better?

By now you will know that when you ask such open-ended questions, it is- your job to shut up and pay attention. The new selling opportunities are always lurking in the answers given. Let the clients talk. In many instances, your customers will invent new work for you on the spot. Occasionally drop in new ideas. Offer to develop a thought into a proposal. Suggest that you do a little development work on a subject and call them next week to see if it is worth proceeding. In the modern business world they call this being proactive. In truth it is simply having ideas and getting things done.

It is a rare person who enjoys doing the same thing over and over again for a very long time. That could mean several hours on the same day. It could mean most days of the week for three months, or most weeks of the year for five years. The ratio doesn’t matter, but the principle does. Eventually we all get bored. Consequently, it is very important that you never do one thing for too long.

In the context of one working day, it is probably unhelpful for you to do one particular thing for more than a couple of hours. To stay fresh, you should move on to something else unless it is one of those exceptional items that simply has to be churned through from time to time and really does take a long while. Even then, you may still need regular breaks from it, and breaking up any monotonous task is a healthy thing to do.

In any particular working week, you really should not be doing literally the same thing every day. You can keep it up for a while, but not for months. Keep reminding yourself that you are the person in charge. Many who work on their own have deliberately left the strictures of company life precisely to gain greater freedom for themselves. It therefore represents a significant irony if they find that they are constrained in some way by their new circumstances. You may think that you have to do a certain thing, but there is always a chance that you do not. Simply pause to consider it, and if the job is really too horrible, decide whether to find a different way round it or, extreme cases, whether to turn the task down.

In any working year, if your work is too repetitive, you have almost certainly got the mix wrong. You need to take time out to review what types of work make up your livelihood. Get a large piece of paper and jot down all the types of work you do. Now put a percentage of time spent by each of them. What does this tell you? For example, if you have only two categories on your sheet of paper, then this means that you spend half a year doing each. That sounds fairly dull, and if this is indeed the case, then you need to be utterly convinced that you love your subject matter and can keep your enthusiasm levels up every time you are engaged to do such jobs. Even if you have six things on the list, you will still have spent two months on each that year. Are you happy with that? If not, you need to re-engineer how you make your money by making some positive changes. Consider declining work that you have too much of, and finding new ways to stimulate more interesting things to do so that you can have a better mix.

If, when reviewing three years or more of the nature of your work, you conclude that you have been doing the same thing for too long, you have a serious problem. There’s no point in embarking on the euphoria and pride of working on your own only to find that you have invented a new but equally boring mousetrap. It really is quite heartbreaking if someone who works on their own says that they are bored and have been for years. It doesn’t make any sense at all. Their destiny is in their own hands, so unfortunately one can only conclude that someone who claims this is probably quite boring themselves and does not have the necessary enterprise to change what they do. You need to nip monotony in the bud. All in all, regardless of what time period you are looking at, this mantra will serve you well: If your work is becoming repetitive, change it.

How would you feel if the phone rang and there was someone on the line offering you work? Not a full-time job, you understand, just a really decent project of the type where you usually have to invest a lot of time to secure it. This time, the pre-sale work has all been done, and they are offering it to you. There could be lots of reasons. They are too busy to do it themselves. They are going on holiday. They were asked about it, but it isn’t precisely what they are best at. So they call to ask if you would be interested.

It’s a great feeling, and it happens when you have let other sole traders know what you do, and when you have offered to help them if they ever get stuck. It works both ways. You may well have been in the same position yourself and referred some work to them some time in the past. Whatever the reason, it is one of the most cost-effective calls you will ever receive, apart from a dream customer ringing out of the blue precisely when you want, proposing exactly what you like, at the right price. So this is a ‘golden phone call’, and they really can work in both directions. You are not alone as a sole trader precisely because these calls move back and forth between well-connected self-employed people all the time. They come about because you have presented your skills well, been thoughtful in introducing contacts to each other, and probably because you have already generated business for the person who is calling you now. Even better, these calls are completely free. They involve none of the usual investment of time and effort that most new business pursuits do. And once you have set the ball rolling, they start working their way back to you.

Sometimes these interrelationships can progress a step further by turning into proper working alliances and subcontracting arrangements. This can be good or bad, depending on how you handle things. Having an overflow facility for your business is good, and so is picking up work from contacts when you have not had to over-invest in securing it. On the downside, these arrangements can take a lot of time and maintenance, so you have to keep a very close eye on whether they are taking up too much of your time in relation to the work they actually generate. The self-employed world is littered with examples of people who talk a good game about networks and alliances, but when you dig deeper you often find that they spend too much time feeding the arrangement to justify the negligible amount of work that it creates. By all means develop your contacts, but don’t fall into this trap.